Freddy's Dead

Well, not exactly. True, that piece today in the Times about funny wiretaps and his childhood friend Manny Gonzalez makes him look kinda bad, but I doubt anyone will pay attention. Especially because he looks so goofy these days. I just get a kick out of this picture of Freddy on the Concourse. It reminds me of more innocent times, when the '80s weren't quite over but you were beginning to relax because it seemed like they were, and the City was not quite as raggedy as it was a few years earlier but not the Disneyland that it is today. Look at those boat-y cars chugging past Freddy. There doesn't seem to be the agendas that exist now. Spike was just starting to conceive of Do the Right Thing. Salsa monga was losing it to that meren-house shit.
I used to wear my hair a little like Freddy, now that I think of it. Pretty nice looking suit he's wearing. He hadn't even said that thing about women having abortions whenever they hiccuped yet. He probably was even still on speaking terms with Angelo Falcon.

Nah.


A word about the Howl! Festival of East Village Arts. I'm not sure what "East Village Arts" means. I think it should mean "Aging Hipster Arts." Tonight La Laura and I checked out Binibon, a really half-assed attempt at capturing the East Village of the early '80s through the lens of the Jack Abbott murder of a waiter who worked at Binibon. It was sort of a play, except the actors were reading off the page like primitive spoken word poets (yes, I was once one of those), and there was music by perennial Downtown noise guy Eliot Sharp (who was good, quite good). But the narrator was this smarmy guy named Jack Womack, and he was often intolerable. There were some pretty good moments in the narrative but for the most part it was a tiresome set of cliches. Most disappointing was the lack of interesting facts about the murder: Abbott was sprung from prison by Norman Mailer; he stabbed the waiter because there was no bathroom at Binibon and the waiter suggested he pee outside; Abbott claimed he was unnerved by an earlier visit to the weird as hell after hours club Berlin; the waiter was the boyfriend of the daughter of Binibon's owner. There could have been so much more about the people and scene going on in the neighborhood at the time. But all we got were black stereotypes, gay stereotypes, and yes, sociopath stereotypes.

So listen, why is the Latino participation in this thing limited to a little Willie Perdomo (at 4 in the afternoon), a little Charas celebration, Raul Malo, a Cuban country western singer, and a little goofy appearance by Luis Guzman? In the world of bohemian rhapsody, why are Latinos always playing the role of exotic window-dressing, the cute Mexican beggars embellishing every hippie hitchhiker's trip to Oaxaca? Frankly I'm sick of it. The Nuyorican Poets Cafe and New Rican Village flourished during bohemia's fallow period of post Ginsbergian junkiedom in the mid-'70s and was the last authentic bit of bohemia before all the lovely Tompkins Square Riot heroes began flocking around the Holiday, St. Mark's Bar and Grill, and the Park Inn. Wasn't that Pedro Pietri staging The Masses Are Asses in the Life Cafe in 1983? Since when did the East Village turn into Williamsburg?